39 Percent of Tech Workers are Depressed

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. It affects people individually and as a community and costs employers billions of dollars every year. Although the tech industry is known for work-life balance and high salaries, tech workers are still susceptible to the disorder.

Users on Blind talk anonymously about burnout, high-stress levels, insomnia, overworking and irregular work hours. These are all characteristics that have shown to increase a person’s chance of developing depression.

A Cisco engineer posts on Blind about experiencing depression

We decided to survey our community of tech employees and see what percentage of employees in the tech industry identify themselves as being in the state of depression.

We asked users to answer ‘True’ or ‘False’ to this statement: I believe I am depressed.

Here’s what we found:

38.78% answered with ‘True’

61.22% answered with ‘False’

We also took a look at the results broken down by companies with at least 100 employee responses. Here’s what we found:

Amazon led the way with 43.4% of employees answering with ‘True’.

Rounding out the top three were Microsoft (with 41.58%) and Intel (with 38.86%).

Apple had the lowest percentage of employees answering with 30.61%.

The two other companies with the lowest percentage of employees answering with ‘False’ are Google (with 33.11%) and Cisco (with 34.69%).

More survey details:

The survey ran from Nov 20 through Nov 28, 2018, and was answered by 10,081 users of the Blind app. Users could only answer once.